The drive has a capacity of 480GB, one of the highest on the market, which translates into a per GB cost of 37.5p which is around 25 per cent less than the competition.

Other than its industry-leading cost per GB, the Vertex 2 also differs by its form factor. It is a 3.5in drive when most other drives are 2.5in models. It doesn't need any converter brackets to fit into a desktop case but then again you will need to do some DIY to get it to fit into anything smaller.

It comes with a SandForce controller, offers read speeds of up to 250MBps and write speeds of up to 240Mbps (burst)/200Mbps (sustained), 4K random write performance of 15KIOPS. Other features include native TRIM support, a power consumption of 2W in use and 500mW in standby, three year warranty and a MTBF of two million hours.

Packing two of those in RAID-0 will provide with some cracking performance for around £360, which is around seven times the cost of a comparable 1TB spinning hard disk drive.